[Cooper's Athenæ Cantabr. ii. 124; Reg. Univ. Oxon. vol. i. (Oxf. Hist. Soc.); Foster's Alumni Oxon.; Strype's Annals (ed. 1824), vol. iii. pt. i. p. 38, pt. ii. pp. 475–7; Le Neve's Fasti, i. 352, 354; Blomefield's Collect. Cantabr. p. 23; Fuller's Church History (ed. 1837), iii. 242; Wood's Fasti, i. 294; Arber's Transcript of Stationers' Registers, iii. 285; Watt's Bibliotheca Britannica.]
PARKER, JOHN (fl. 1655), judge, came from Weylond Underwood, Buckinghamshire, and was admitted a student of Gray's Inn in 1611. He was called to the bar on 26 June 1617, and became successively an ancient of his inn in 1638, a bencher in 1640, and reader in 1642. For many years he lived at Gravesend and was recorder of that town (Green, Domestic State Papers, 20 May 1658), and a militia commissioner for Kent (ib. 19 Feb. 1651). On 20 March 1647 he was appointed a Welsh judge, and in the following year (12 May) received the commons' commission to try rioters in Wales. He seems to have found favour with parliament, for by it he was made a serjeant on 30 Oct. 1648, was confirmed in his Welsh judgeship on 5 March 1649, and on 18 July in the same year he was granted a patent for a registrarship in the prerogative court. By statute of 9 July 1651 he was appointed to try causes at Durham, and later—before 1655, but when is not precisely known—was appointed a baron of the exchequer. He was member for Rochester in the parliaments of 1654 and 1656, and was summoned by Cromwell as assistant to the upper house. He lost his judgeship at the Restoration, but met with no other disfavour, and was even, alone among the Commonwealth serjeants, summoned to the degree of serjeant-at-law (Siderfin, Reports, i. 4). He issued in 1650 a book entitled ‘Government of the People of England, precedent and present’ (a small tract in the Thomason Collection at the British Museum). Parker's eldest son, Dr. Samuel Parker, bishop of Oxford, is separately noticed.
[Foss's Judges of England; Whitelocke's Memorials, pp. 305, 346, 386, 414, 678, 693; Parl. Hist. iii. 1430, 1480, 1519; Godwin's History, ii. 235, iii. 527; Wood's Athenæ, iv. 225; Hardre's Reports; Inderwick's Interregnum; Marvell's Rehearsal Transprosed, ed. 1674, pt. ii. p. 67.]
PARKER, JOHN (d. 1681), archbishop of Tuam, born in Dublin was son of John Parker, prebendary of Maynooth. He took the degree of doctor of divinity in Trinity College, Dublin, received deacon's orders in 1638, obtained prebends in the two Dublin cathedrals, and was appointed a chaplain to the Marquis of Ormonde. The parliamentarian government deprived Parker of his ecclesiastical offices, and, on suspicion of being a royalist spy, he was committed to prison. Through an exchange of prisoners he regained his liberty, and when Ormonde left Ireland in 1650, Parker went to England, where he resided till the restoration of Charles II.
In 1660 Parker was appointed bishop of Elphin, whence in 1667 he was promoted to the archiepiscopal see of Tuam. He was translated in 1678 to the see of Dublin, in which he continued till his death on 28 Dec. 1681. A sermon preached by Parker before the House of Commons, Dublin, was printed in 1663. Some of his letters are extant in the Ormonde archives.
[Works of Sir J. Ware, 1739; Dalton's Archbishops of Dublin, 1838; Cotton's Fasti, 1851.]
PARKER, JOHN (fl. 1705), colonel and Jacobite conspirator, was descended, according to D'Alton (King James's Irish Army List, Dublin, 1855), from a family long settled in Ireland. His ancestor, John Parker, was appointed constable of Dublin Castle in 1543, and from 1553 till his death in 1564 was master of the rolls in Ireland (Cal. of State Papers, Ireland). Colonel John Parker was born about 1654. His father, William Parker, excise commissioner in 1652–3, and afterwards a physician at Margate, was probably the William Parker who graduated in medicine at Bourges in 1634, and who in 1664 became an honorary fellow of the London College of Physicians. His mother was Judith, daughter of Roger Beckwith of Aldborough, Yorkshire. In 1676 he was appointed captain of a company in the Duke of Monmouth's regiment in France, in 1678 he became captain in the Duke of York's regiment, in 1681 brigadier-lieutenant, in 1683 lieutenant in the guards, in 1685 captain of horse; later in that year major of Lord Arran's cavalry regiment, and in 1687 lieutenant-colonel of that regiment (Dalton, Army Lists, 1892–1894). He followed James II to St. Germain and to Ireland, and was wounded at the Boyne, where his troop of cavalry sustained severe losses. Burnet describes him as employed in France ‘in many black designs;’ while Speaker Onslow, whose mother was Parker's niece, says: ‘There was nothing that was the most desperate or even wicked which he would not have undertaken for the service of his master, from a strange notion of fidelity and honour.’ Arrested in London in 1693 as a party to the assassination plot against William III, Parker escaped, and was seen
